Tuesday, May 20, 2008

One Can at a Time...

Our new ward/stake is really focusing on food storage right now. Every week I leave Relief Society a little more scared about the current state of the economy, and having enough food storage. We don't have a year's supply of food stored up yet, and every time I try to get to it, I feel SO overwhelmed, that I give up (this seems to be a recurring theme in my life... :) ).

So, our ward began doing a "One Can at a Time" project. With the though being, if each family could just spend $1 or $2 a week on food storage, that by buying one can of food a week (or whatever you can afford), by the end of the year, you'd have at least 52 cans of food, etc., and be SO much better off.

Every Sunday, this sweet sister in our ward brings in several bags of food, and shows us what's on sale, and how much you can get with just $1. She totally psyched me up, and I decided to talk to Mike and go for it.

Mike and I decided that we could do $3-$4 dollars a week. This week at our Smith's, all of the Post cereal is 4/$4. So, I bought 4 boxes. Each of the "Use By" dates is about a year from now, and I've been told that if you freeze the cereal for the first 24 hours, and THEN store it on a shelf, that the bacteria is killed and they can last even longer. But, I'm not completely sure on that, so I'm going to have to research that a bit.

But, still. It's pretty cool. And not overwhelming at all. I can totally handle buying a little bit each week (storage space is probably going to be a problem at some point, but I'll deal with it then). And since we're going by what's on sale, if we ever had to use it in an emergency, we might be eating some weird meals (cereal with spaghetti sauce, anyone?), but it feels pretty good to be doing something towards building our food storage.